How the Web Prevents Rape

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http://www.slate.com/id/2152487/?nav=tap3

How the Web Prevents Rape
All that Internet porn reduces sex crimes. Really.
By Steven E. Landsburg
Posted Monday, Oct. 30, 2006, at 2:22 PM ET
Does pornography breed rape? Do violent movies breed violent crime? Quite the opposite, it seems.

First, porn. What happens when more people view more of it? The rise of the Internet offers a gigantic natural experiment. Better yet, because Internet usage caught on at different times in different states, it offers 50 natural experiments.

The bottom line on these experiments is, "More Net access, less rape." A 10 percent increase in Net access yields about a 7.3 percent decrease in reported rapes. States that adopted the Internet quickly saw the biggest declines. And, according to Clemson professor Todd Kendall, the effects remain even after you control for all of the obvious confounding variables, such as alcohol consumption, police presence, poverty and unemployment rates, population density, and so forth.

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